Your Vote Is Your Duty To A Greater Nigeria

Your vote, as the saying goes, is your strength. It is your power. It is indeed the very foundation of democratic governance. Never trifle with it; never joke with the power of your vote.

Whatever it is you want your country to be, your vote is the seed you sow for it. Without a vote, you have no say, without your vote, you have nothing to harvest.

Therefore on the 16th of February and on the 2nd of March, you must understand that voting is not just a responsibility, it is also your duty to your nation and your future.

Government has spent huge sums to provide you the opportunity to vote, so don’t waste it. You must understand your vote from the perspective of social responsibility as well as your investment in the Nigeria you expect to live in the next four years.

To ‘siddon look’ is not an option in a democratic system. You and every citizen have a duty to queue up to choose the persons to leadyou in the next four years.

Don’t say politics is not for you. Politicking is for everybody while office may not be for everyone. There is an aphorism that man is a political animal, therefore everyone is more or less a politician.

Man lives in society and politics is simply the process by which society is governed. It is that process through which leaders emerge to exercise civil authority or dominance, whether formally via elections or informally via communal interactions.

Many people wrongly think that politics is for other people. How wrong they are Politics is everybody’s business because politics affects everyone and everybody.

Politics determines whether you get a job or not. Politics determines whether you are safe or not. Politics determines the quality of education available to your kids. It determines the value of the money in your pocket and the kind of road you drive on.

Indeed, politics is both the blood and the heart of a nation and its people. Politics, as far as society is concerned, is the life of societyand should be the concern of everyone in the society.

It is in politics that man moves and lives and has his material being. It cannot be otherwise since man lives in society and society must be orderly for man to thrive in it. Without a system ofgovernance, society will never be able to serve man efficiently and effectively. Democracy is undoubtedly the most inclusive system for achieving that. Without citizen participation, democracy becomes but a sham.

Democracy requires your participation not only to vote but also to be votes for. Indeed the process of democracy does not start and end with elections. On the contrary, elections are one of the many processes that make democracy the beauty that it is.

You cannot think of elections without thinking of the ideas on which and with which a society or nation ought to be governed. Political ideology is the soul of political systems. Ideology, simply put, is the ideals with which a nation and its political system are run.

A political system without ideology is a system bereft of ethics. This is possible only because the citizenry have erroneously left politics to professional politicians. That can only be as good as leaving the

living in the care of mortuary owners and their business.

Without the active participation and watchfulness of citizens, politics degenerates into a mere business of profit for the politician. And that can never be good for a country. It is for this reason that the idea of universal suffrage evolved. Man cannot be efficiently governed without his participation in the choice of who exercises the power of civic authority.

Once upon a time, priests ruled and it was called theocracy. Then elders ruled and it was called gerontocracy. Then the rich families ruled and it was called aristocracy and oligarchy, which is the rule of few.

But Sociology and Political Science agreed that democracy, which necessitates the participation of everyone, is the best form of government that man has evolved. Unfortunately, too many people do not bother to participate because they are ignorant of the importance and necessity of their participation. They think that they are too busy and too holy for politics.

You cannot rule yourself out of involvement in choosing leaders, only for you to come up to complain about bad governance or lousy government policies. It’s like a man who refused to eat, yet, he comes around to complain of hunger, or the one who refused to farm only to come up to complain that he has nothing to harvest.

If you want a better society, go out there and work for it. Engage in civic education. Engage your representatives in debates on the direction your community wants to go and should go. Politics is not only being in a political party or standing for elections; politics is also community activism.

A man who works to see good come to his community is engaging in politics. The one who stands akimbo and feigns “siddon look” is precisely the sort of person who makes it possible for thugs, cultists and other misfits to hijack both the political process and the treasury.

How can a crowd of dubious characters deliver good governance? How can thugs and sundry election hijackers do the public any good? The way out of the current situation is for everyone, I mean everyone above 18, to become active in politics. That is the only way to national progress and redemption.

The more people get involved in the process, the more likely it is that the bad people will be in the minority. The more sanity there is, the more likely that the insane will be crowded out of politics and rulership.

The moment people realise this, from that moment politics and political engagement will change. I repeat, politics is not just about elections and political parties it is the totality of social activism for a better society. It is a job for everyone because everybody will benefit from good governance, so everyone should be involved in the process, just like everyone suffers from bad governance when society allows the evil minded to rule.